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Really interesting find. An old theme in archeology has been the importance of invention, in a chain of events leading to modernity. A pretty orthodox interpre

• jojobas 6y ago
  Group size was defined by food sources. You can't feed a large group by hunting-gathering - the food will be too far. Groups can convene when there's plenty of food but have to disperse again.
  • netcan 6y ago
    Perhaps. I mean, it is certainly true that everyone needs to eat. OTOH, thinking of these as a chain of events is what I am calling the orthodox view. IE, new food sources (maybe because new food production/gathering methods) lead to larger groups and other complexity. Gobekli Tepeh, for example, gives us a somewhat reversed picture. Preceding grain cultivation and other neolithic elements, we find a major cultural site. Acres of statuary, stone structures. But if we are going to narrate a chain of events... it can't be agriculture first, then large group sizes, then more. Complex religious, politics or whatever the Gobeklin Tepens were up to preceded agriculture. Their agriculture grew from a culture that already had large group sizes, and the religious/political/cultural machinery that comes with it. Maybe pre existing group sizes demonstrated by the scale of the site created the demand for agriculture. Maybe large group sizes are necessary for discoveries like grain cultivation methods to spread.
    • akiselev 6y ago
      I think you're reading way too much into Gobekli Tepeh and making the same mistakes we made a hundred years ago thinking that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The Gobekli Tepeh excavation was started in the mid-90s and it's still on-going. How its discoveries fit into the rest of anthropology is an open question and something as simple as a repeat analysis of the agricultural artifact dating could reverse the timeline.
      • netcan 6y ago
        I think it runs the other way. There is an orthodox view of the chain of events. We can call it a theory, but it is more suggestive than predictive. Still, its only the strongest theory as long as it is most parsimonious with existing evidence, artifacts mostly. Artifacts are sparse, but it isn't totally absent. Maybe I'm over extrapolating, but not using lack of evidence as evidence. Lack of evidence as evidence comes into play more in the the orthodox view before. It extrapolates a timeline of the fertile crescent. First comes semi-nomadic agriculture,^ then permanent villages, then towns, then "civilised" religion/politics/etc. The timeline assumes an absence of institutions like religion or politics from the absence of public buildings or monuments. Gobekli Tepeh is one hell of a public building, monument or whatever it is. Gobekli Tepeh is firmly dated before any known agricultural, villages, towns, etc. The agriculture date is especially strong, because archeology agrees with genetics. It is some sort of big political/religious/cultural thing. Using the same logic as the theory I'm challenging, we need to reorder things... or maybe conclude we have no idea. That said, it seems like (most scholars agree) that the site was made by non agricultural people. IMO, even concepts like settled/nomadic may need rethinking. How nomadic? What kind of nomadic. The range of possibilities is much bigger than village life. It's possible that earlier evidence for agriculture will be discovered, which would mean ice age agriculture... possibly of species that are no longer cultivated. Gobekli Tepeh itself will definitely turn up more dates, very possibly older too.
        • AlotOfReading 6y ago
          In my opinion, Gobekli Tepe isn't interesting because it's suggestive of pre-agricultural sedentary societies. We know those existed a long, long time before recognizable domestication occurred and probably even before the LGM. Gobekli Tepe is interesting because it's clearly monumental a heck of a lot earlier than the traditional narrative thought was possible. Classically, archaeologists argued that monuments were a thing of "big, complex hierarchial societies with full agriculture". The modern counterexamples were dismissed as unrepresentative, anomalous, or "cultural transmission" (i.e. copy-cats). Newer generation folks, myself included, think it's a dumb dismissal and having sites to corroborate that is nice. Unrelated, but there are species that were formerly cultivated by early foragers/farmers that got dropped over time. Rambling vetch is one example. There are some large preservation biases in what we're able to see of early sites. Grasses preserve best, so we've focused a bit too much on them relative to what was likely consumed.
  • phaemon 6y ago
    That didn't seem to stop Genghis Khan uniting the nomadic Mongol tribes?
    • jojobas 6y ago
      They were pastoralists long before that.
      • phaemon 6y ago
        Oh right. I'd always thought that the idea of agriculture leading to civilisation, it referred exclusively to farms and fields of crops. If you include pastoralists, was there really any time when most humans were hunter-gatherer?
        • AlotOfReading 6y ago
          Yes, about the same 98% of human history that we also weren't farmers. Domestication of animals and crops in the near east occurred very close in time.
        • netcan 6y ago
          It does generally exclude pastoralists. In fact, it pretty much ignores and overlooks them. There was definitely a time when most humans were hunter-gatherers, including or excluding pastoralists. The earliest evidence fore very much of either is only about 8000 years old. Hunting and gathering was probably the primary mode of food production while the pyramids were being built... even in areas near egypt. There is a very big BUT though. "Hunting and gathering" is an extremely big universe of possible lifestyles. Agriculture is a lot more monolithic.
  • jcranmer 6y ago
    The Precolumbian Pacific Northwest would take issue with that statement. There is also an argument that Peruvian urban development (in the Norte Chico area) predates the domestication of a primary grain as a food crop.
• pjc50 6y ago
  I wonder if this points to the importance of "group technologies", such as rule of law and democracy. Because they're so intangible they've very hard to reconstruct from societies where we don't have written records. But they can greatly affect success and prosperity. And they're also a lot more fragile - potentially can regress within a generation.
  • netcan 6y ago
    To me, these are the big questions. It's also hard to avoid bias, since we have such strong and abstract feelings about "group technologies, such as rule of law and democracy." Fragility is an interesting question. I think Richard Dawkins' "meme" concept needs some more study. I suspect that "rule of law and democracy" might be extremely antifragile, on some level. The institutions (courts, parliaments) can break. You can even break with the belief system. The memes will still exist though, in some form. They're hard to shake, eve if you want to. Consider money. If society collapsed and reformed, money would certainly still exist. Even if no survivors are experts in money, it will be near impossible to shake the meme. It wouldn't be surprising if the concepts suddenly reemerge years later. Is this because money is inevitable, or is it because memes are resilient? A lot of modern ponderings about "human nature" is framed as "nature vs nurture." Simplistically, nature is inevitable. Nurture is not. It is surprisingly (and frustratingly) difficult to nature and nurture apart, IRL. I would reframe it as "memetic vs genetic." Group technologies are memes. They exist in, and also define culture. This is ultimately YNH's frame for history. Up until point X in time, genes defined humanity. After point X, memes define humanity. Memetics works faster, but in a similar way.
  • Sharlin 6y ago
    Institutions like democracy and rule of law seem to be solutions to coordination problems that only emerge once a society grows much larger—both geographically and population-wise—than a hunter-gatherer group.
• sergeykish 6y ago
  I do not think it is understood literally by scholars today. Even with all the knowledge individuals ability has not changed much. We depend on infrastructure, cooperation and specialization. Take them away and life is miserable. Some may replicate fire, shelter, spear, pottery, basket, rope. This also means people 50000 years ago had same ingenuity. As I understand our difference from chimps is ability to learn in adulthood (eternal childhood) and living in bigger groups. Domesticated version [1], just without floppy ears. [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185306 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
• jcranmer 6y ago
  > I don't think anyone meant this totally literally and linearly but, it was thought of as a chain of events. It was meant totally literally and linearly in the 19th century. Failing to have produced the latter steps on the way to civilization was taken to be a sign that you were a less evolved form of human being, and it was thus totally cool that you should be ruled over by the fully-evolved Europeans. Remember, this is the age of scientific racism, and any science which could help bolster the argument that Europeans were inherently superior would be eagerly drunk up.
  • netcan 6y ago
    I was probably overcompensating, trying to be civil. Yes, imperialist/racist views of the 19th century used this narrative a lot. 20th century racism had a lot of pseudoarchaeology thrown into it too. The concept of "civilisation" especially. A lot of the actual theory is marxist though, a materialist narrative of the neolithic.